Thin Air
by Juliedoo
Summary: This love is clumsy, he fumbles it between his hands. But being with her is as natural as breathing.


.

He can't help but think that sometimes, trying to make the best out of life is a bit like mining for gold in a pile of shit.

Other times, when he's with the woman who's curled up in his lap like an imperious kitten on a fleshy throne, he feels as high and as swollen as god. Punch drunk with power and capable of denting reality into something less ugly if he wants to, like shaping wet clay into a coffee mug.

She shifts in her sleep, beetle dark hair curtaining his legs and puddling on the supple mattress of grass. Her slumbering breath puffs against his jeans, and the sound of it deafens his own pulse.

Above them, the evening sky is like their tablecloth, salted with stars. Dusk is a clandestine voyeur, crouched just out of sight. They're in a postage stamp sized park in the middle of Karakura, and beyond the wall of trees and empty swingsets the bloodless city looms like the skeleton of some sort of primordial monster, exhaling pollution and watching them with glowing, electric eyes that bleed out of high windows. An orchestra of car horns disrupts the syrupy air, clattering against his eardrums and knocking at the door of his skull like a manic insurance salesman.

He tries to feel annoyed by it, but Karin grunts in her sleep and the piggish noise is a band-aid to his scraped nerves.

He doesn't much care for the World of the Living. It's too noisy, too loud, too foreign from the quiet and archaic fields of Soul Society, the mute walls of his office that smell like parchment and ink and the alcohol Matsumoto somehow always manages to smuggle into the room when he isn't looking. He dislikes it, but every time he steps out of the _senkaimon _and winds up at her door he feels peace wash over him in some cheap sort of baptism, washing his sins and regrets and bitterness away. (But not his fear, never that.)

This woman that he loves, prickly and sour and blithe, somehow manages to stitch the wounds in his soul closed merely by existing. By loving him back. (It petrifies him.)

It wells and lodges in his throat, this inept affection. He's terrified, because he can never take care of what he cherishes, like a clumsy little boy crushing a butterfly between his palms when all he wants to do is keep it from being torn away by the wind.

He wants to tear down her plaster skin, brick a wall around her heart so it won't be bruised. But she wouldn't want that, doesn't need him to protect her from the world—Karin is the sort of person who kicks the world in the teeth if she doesn't like what it's saying. She's no damsel, and that's probably why he loves her in the first place, because he's not a knight. He's played at being one before, but that didn't work out so well.

(Karin is not Momo. She _isn't_. It's still scary sometimes, though, to imagine her in that ill-fated role.)

"You're thinking too much again." Her voice, a sluggish murmur still wading through the dregs of her nap, tumbles into his pensive silence. "It makes you look like you've got to take a shit."

He blinks down at her, reminded again that this is Kurosaki's sister and Shiba-taicho's daughter and crass vulgarity is apparently an inherited trait within their family, and finds her peering up at him through the spidery ferns of her thick eyelashes. Soft and doe eyed and sleepy, as trusting as a newborn with her nose burrowed into his stomach. A fist clenches in his chest. He has to take a deep breath because suddenly his lungs have quit working and where has all his breath gone?

"Being around you for a prolonged amount of time would give anyone diarrhea," he quips back absently, another volley in their verbal tennis match. Tease and snark and aim below the belt and mean none of it. It's all in good fun.

(He has fun with her. It's a novelty.)

Her face scrunches up. "Yeah, well, your mom's a virgin," she mutters petulantly.

"You're nonsensical."

"Your _face _is nonsensical."

Such is the routine. It's juvenile and stupid and he would never do this with anyone else, but Karin is Karin so it's okay to be immature and to act the age he looks as long as no one else is watching.

They build boats out of words and thoughts and feelings, he and she, and sail on troubled waters to that freckled shore on the other side of nowhere, and when it's just the two of them they can forget where they come from and who they are. And it's sort of wonderful, because there's nowhere to go at the edge of the world but over.

It's odd that such a volatile woman makes him feel so tranquil, but he and Karin have never made much sense anyway, so he has long stopped bothering to wonder _why. _They just are.

.

* * *

**AN: **Of course I had to write another HitsuKarin. They're my power couple, bless their cotton socks. Inspired by "Thin Air" by Pearl Jam. Which is a damn good song. Anyway, hope you liked it. n_n


End file.
